The short answer is that TeX doesn't know how to deal with UTF-8 (or rather non-ASCII) characters. XeTeX has been designed to work around these limitations. The easiest way to generate PDFs is to install Xe(La)TeX and use the 'xedemo' templates - these templates have been 'ported' from LaTeX to XeLaTeX.

Distribution specific install instructions listed below.

Debian / Ubuntu

Install texlive-xetex that includes xelatex

apt-get install texlive-xetex

but you need to patch LaTeX::DriverInstall liblatex-{driver,encode,table}-perl for latex

LedgerSMB xelatex configuration

Install xelatex and change the LedgerSMB configuration from the menu:System -> System Defaults -> Templates directoryChange to "xedemo"

Change a path

From the mailing list: (Chris Travers)Right now, I am open to suggestions on a better approach, as the Template::Latex api's don't seem to work to do this, but I resorted to changing the paths in LaTeX::Driver::Paths directly (find the location with locate LaTeX/Driver/Paths.pm). This file gets written at installation time for the LaTeX::Driver module and so I consider it reasonably editable.

The templates use the Template Toolkit scripting language to generate actual content.
Depending on the typesetting language, the files use
* HTML;
* (Xe)LaTeX; or
* plain text
as the typesetting system.

While LaTeX and XeLaTeX are extremely similar, some differences exist, mainly in the area of font selection and document preamble.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
! You are attempting to make a LaTeX format from a source file
! That is more than five years old.
!
! If you enter to scroll past this message then the format
! will be built, but please consider obtaining newer source files
! before continuing to build LaTeX.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
! LaTeX source files more than 5 years old!.
l.545 ...aTeX source files more than 5 years old!}
?
! Emergency stop.
l.545 ...aTeX source files more than 5 years old!}
No pages of output.
Transcript written on xelatex.log.
Error: `xetex -ini -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex -etex xelatex.ini' failed
###############################################################################
fmtutil: Error! Not all formats have been built successfully.
Visit the log files in directory
/var/lib/texmf/web2c
for details.
###############################################################################
This is a summary of all `failed' messages and warnings:
`xetex -ini -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex -etex xelatex.ini' failed

This is confirmed to be a problem on CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and Fedora Core 13.